Housing projects aimed at students are getting taller and coming faster near Purdue. Could they change the face of a near-campus neighborhood, too?

The obvious story of The Hub, a $40 million to $50 million, high-rise housing complex aimed at the Purdue student market, was in metrics too big to miss Monday night.

The place is going to stand 10 stories tall when it opens in the fall of 2018: the first of its kind for the West Lafayette Village and the tallest in the city outside a handful of buildings on campus.

The official line from the county’s planners, contained in an Area Plan Commission report: “The Hub is merely the next step in the urban evolution of West Lafayette.” No one on the council disputed that about the 599-bed project a half-block south of State Street and Harry’s Chocolate Shop. One city council member — Nick DeBoer, who has made it a personal campaign to keep rent prices in check by encouraging as many beds near campus as possible — personally thanked the Chicago-based developers for a project that went so vertically, in a way that “really will make this part of my district shine.”

Less obvious was a quiet theory being shared and that could be tested soon: Will The Hub, not to mention an influx of high-density housing projects in the Village and on the west side of campus, be the thing that changes the face — if not the fate – of the New Chauncey neighborhood by luring students and siphoning demand for single-family rentals in the blocks near campus?

And would that in turn open doors to a tight West Lafayette housing market, prompting landlords to bail on the historic neighborhood and clear the way for young families itching to get children into West Side schools right at the time the district is getting ready to expand its facilities?

“That would be the dream,” said Peter Bunder, West Lafayette City Council president, whose district includes much of New Chauncey neighborhood’s mix of professors, university staff and Purdue undergrads. “It’s fun to think about, if nothing else. We shall see.”

The pressure of the student rental market on the 1920s bungalows that dominate New Chauncey isn’t anything new for homeowners who live there. According to the New Chauncey Neighborhood Plan, a land use plan hashed out in 2013, 60 percent of all residential structures in the neighborhood just east of Purdue were rentals. Of those 543 total rentals in New Chauncey, 61 percent were single-family homes.

The owner-occupied housing stock lost serious ground between 2003 and 2011, when the city saw the number of properties requiring rental property inspections climb from 481 to 582. That was a 20 percent increase.

The numbers made sense, considering the demand from students looking for an easy walk to campus. The 5½-year average for rental vacancies was less than 1 percent for New Chauncey, the Village and the south campus areas south of State Street, according to a Student Rental Report and Survey compiled in November 2015 by the Area Plan Commission. By comparison, the rental vacancy rates were 1.7 percent for West Lafayette and 6.6 percent in Lafayette.

“I don’t know if you can put it on The Hub, or on any one project, really, to change things on their own,” said Erik Carlson, West Lafayette development director. “Even when you’re talking about something as big as The Hub. But put them all together, and you have a different story.”

This is an artist's rendering of The Hub, a proposed 10-story, 599-bed residential project at Pierce and Wood streets, a few blocks from Purdue University. Construction started this spring.(Photo: Tippecanoe Area Plan Commission)

The Hub follows a series of smaller, five-story developments in the Village area and along the eastern fringes of campus: Chauncey Square, 225 Northwestern, The Fuse, South Street Station and more. Another Chicago-based developer, R2 Companies, told the J&C in September that it hopes to buy the University Lutheran Church property at Chauncey Avenue and State Street and build a residential building even taller than The Hub.

In September, Muinzer Partners, an affiliate of the Chicago-based South Street Capital, bought 616 W. Stadium Ave., a strip center near the corner of Northwestern Avenue that includes Follett’s Boiler Bookstore. Marc Muinzer, who had a hand in Chauncey Square in the Village and the earliest iterations of The Fuse across from Mackey Arena, said the firm also is under contract to buy nearby properties in the block. Muinzer said the plans are for the sort of high-density, mixed-use, five-story development called for in the block in the New Chauncey Neighborhood Plan.

On campus, where Purdue enrollment set a record at 40,450 this fall, Purdue President Mitch Daniels has been emphatic that the university needs to find ways to get more students to live on campus. Purdue added 870 beds this fall with its Honors College and Residences. And that’s all before Browning Investments — the firm hired by Purdue Research Foundation to whip up a 20-year, $1.2 billion development plan for what’s being called the Innovation District on west campus — makes its first significant move.

“That’s a lot of action,” Carlson said. “Those all are going to pull (renters) from somewhere.”

From where? No one can say for sure. That’s why The Hub Effect on New Chauncey is simply a theory being played around with at this point.

Patti Weida doesn’t buy it. Weida Apartments has 15 houses in New Chauncey and about 400 apartments scattered near campus. She said, if anything, the apartment complexes that went up far west of campus, along Sagamore Parkway in the Klondike area, would take the brunt.

“It won’t affect New Chauncey at all,” Weida said. “There are students who want houses, and there always will be. … Everything is location, location, location in the real estate business. That’s where the houses they want are. That’s not going to change.”

Before leaving the position last spring, Chandler Poole, former West Lafayette development director, said this question — whether the emergence of student housing projects that were taller and with more beds had the potential to free up New Chauncey housing stock for more homeowners — was a pet issue of his.

“It has to in some way,” Poole said this past week from his home in Madison, Wis., where developers of The Hub in West Lafayette just developed an even bigger version near the University of Wisconsin.

“The weaker landlords will fall by the wayside. That’s OK. That’s natural market forces at work,” Poole said. “If they have to fix up their places, add new paint, make updates to keep up, well, that’s OK, too. … What I was hoping for is if we do this, we do it in small steps — let the market settle back down each time before we throw another 600 beds into the mix, so we don’t have this giant sucking sound from somewhere.”

It might be too late for that. With the State Street Project, a $120 million collaboration between West Lafayette and Purdue, in play, developers on either side of campus are getting aggressive with what city planners call urban development.

The 2015 Student Rental Report and Survey queried landlords about the new competition near campus. The report indicated that landlords said they were “in the position of finding innovative ways to stave off vacancies.” That meant renovations, lowering rents, offering flexible lease terms.

It also meant this: “Four representatives of management companies that specialize in rental homes near campus (typically single-family or duplex homes) reported that the increases in units near campus over the last few years made it more difficult to rent to the undergraduate student set in particular.”

The report doesn’t give hints about whether landlords are ready to sell, though.

Rocky Killion is West Lafayette Community Schools superintendent. He said he’s frequently approached by parents frustrated about finding a house available in West Lafayette, one of the top-flight public districts in the state. West Side in 2015 quit allowing open enrollment for new students who lived in other districts, because the schools were nearing capacity. Since then, Killion’s taken to tracking days-on-the-market stats on houses in the district. (“Seven to 20 days are the numbers I keep hearing,” Killion said.)

West Lafayette is close to launching a $50 million project that will add a new elementary school at Lindberg Road and Salisbury Street and upgrade the three existing schools. The timetable is still be hammered out. But once done, Killion said, West Side would have room for 2,800 students, up 19 percent from this year’s enrollment of 2,353.

“We’ve tried to keep an eye on how the housing stock is going, including how things might break in relation to new student housing around Purdue,” Killion said. “As I tell people, there’s no scientific way to know some of these things. … We’re watching, that’s for sure.”

Carlson, the city’s new development director, said he’s not ready to guess what’s going to happen, either.

But given the West Side housing market right now — “You hear about these places being sold, sight unseen, to get into the school district,” he said — Carlson said the motivation to sell could get stronger as newer student housing options a few blocks closer to campus crop up.

“You have to let the market work itself out,” Carlson said, “but that wouldn’t be a bad thing for New Chauncey. That theory, it seems to make some sense.”

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davebangert.